Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.22

Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in your power. Take away, then, when you choose your opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, you will find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 12.22 (tr Long)

Relativists love this passage, and many others like it, because they think it means that Stoicism denies that there is any objective truth. They are free to think so, of course, that all propositions are both equally true and false, but I would suggest that this is not what Marcus Aurelius intends.

It isn’t that there is no truth or falsehood, or any right or wrong, or that we can never know anything with certainty. It is rather that how we think about things, our opinions, estimations, or judgments, will directly shape how we live, and that by changing our thinking we can determine whether we find happiness or misery.

It is my own thinking that will bring me closer to Nature, or make me drift further away from it. All is opinion, because that is the only thing that will make or break me. It isn’t my circumstances that make me troubled or content, angry or accepting, hateful or loving. Conflict or peace are not states given to me, but something I make of what is given.

Having spent most of my adult life accompanied by the Black Dog has often felt like a curse, something no one, not even my worst enemy, should ever have to endure. Yet I have also, in a rather odd sort of way, learned to turn it into a blessing. I have sat down and talked it through endlessly with fancy professionals, I have been on all sorts of pills whose names I can’t pronounce, and I have tried to exorcise my demons with prayer.

Yet the Black Dog never went away, and over the years he actually seemed to become bigger and stronger. No matter, let me make good use of him, as much as he claws, and bites, and blocks my light. He is as important to me as I make him out to be.

Does it hurt? Good, let me learn some compassion from it. Does he fill me with doubt? Good, let me struggle all the harder to find certainty. Does he tell me I should surrender, that my life is not worth living? Good, let me live all the more. Let me smile through my tears, and let me wash myself clean with them.

The only thing that ever kept the Black Dog on his leash was the way I thought about him, and how I decided to understand what was happening to me. He never went away, but he doesn’t have to. I have used him to become better. What little kindness and decency I have in me actually came from having him around.

I won’t find that calm and peaceful bay somewhere out there, but only within myself. I will do this by using my reason, that little Divine spark within me, that can find meaning and purpose in anything and everything. I can keep what benefits me, and leave what harms me.

Written in 9/2009